Crowded land of giants

The biggest house on the smallest block for the lowest price... That's the rationale behind the new suburbia, complete with triple garages, faux facades and tiny backyards. So is it heaven or an architectural horror? Janet Hawley visits the crowded land of the giants.

Welcome to McMansion Land ... gasp, gasp, GASP! On both sides of freeways leading west outside of Sydney and Melbourne, the undeveloped land of old is disappearing under brick-and-tile seas of huge, cookie-cutter, double-storey project houses with triple garages, packed onto small blocks of land, with barely a tree in sight.

For years we've watched the middle-class gentrification of the inner city. Now it's the turn of the once straggly outer-urban fringes to be gentrified. Join in the mad race to buy a bulldozed-bare, handkerchief-sized lot, lay a concrete slab, build a cavernous trophy home in 20 weeks, and settle into the new heartland of the aspirational voter.

For many people, their initial reaction on first viewing this recent evolution of the great Australian dream is one of horror. Veer off the freeway and drive around the maze of new developments crammed with McMansions (a term coined in the US to describe the outsize mansions burgeoning there) and, at first, all of this raw, oversized new housing feels overwhelming and bizarre.

Houses loom as if on steroids and seem weirdly out of proportion, waists sucked in to squeeze inside the boundaries. There's a few metres of back courtyard, and the narrow fenceless front garden is dominated by the stencilled concrete driveway, with a manicured lawn, row of small matching plants, and feature letterbox.

Curious pitched roofs have no eaves, and fit on top of houses like caps, rather than shady hats, allowing walls to be jammed closer to the boundaries.

Pause in a quiet cul-de-sac of McMansions in Kellyville, Baulkham Hills or Castle Hill to Sydney's north-west, or Camden, Narellan or Macquarie Fields in the south-west, and it feels like a studio lot for an American sitcom: you almost expect happy families to bound out the front door, theme music and credits rolling.

Sociologist Gabrielle Gwyther, now in her third year of research on this topic, observes: "They go there because they want to live amongst 'people like us'. They are all upwardly mobile, middle-to-high-income earners, tremendously houseproud, raising their nice children to share their high aspirations, get good educations and good careers, and not get into trouble with teenage gangs. They love cocooning inside their McMansions, which are like castles, fun factories and mini resorts in one."

Obviously they do not consider their homes vulgar or bloated, and are fiercely defensive when "elitist" architecture critics write withering pieces about their concept of a patch of paradise. When The Sydney Morning Herald's Elizabeth Farrelly described Kellyville's aesthetics in terms that included "heartbreakingly, wrist-slittingly ... ugliness ... obesity ... leaden the soul", locals struck back.

Kellyville resident Joe Pereira shot off a letter to the editor, telling Farrelly: "My wife and I know perfectly well how to brief an architect, but at the moment we'd rather put our resources elsewhere. In the end we must do what is best for our kids, and that's where Kellyville shines ... Sneer through the steaming haze of your decaf soyaccino if you wish, but homogeneity brings a certain comfort, security, and a sense of true community that other Sydneysiders can only dream about. Dare to be similar."

The McMansion trend began in the late 1980s in the US, where there's also a trend to herding together in partially self-governing gated communities, dubbed privatopias.

Leading architect Andrew Andersons muses: "Superficially, you think, my God, this is a whole lot of kitschy, fake-bourgeois crap. And it's astoundingly contradictory to go all the way out to this new outer suburbia but have no more land or privacy than if you're living in inner-urban houses in Paddington or Leichhardt. Plus the place appears totally environmentally unsustainable, with no shady trees, clipped eaves, houses cooking in the afternoon western sun, everyone's air-conditioners and dryers churning away.

"But this is not suburban wasteland: the planners are putting genuine effort into making it a sustainable community. Some of the best planning that's ever happened in suburbia is occurring right now - which isn't what you'd think as you drive past it."

Indeed, mixed in with the rash of woeful new developments are islands of other well-considered, master-planned neighbourhoods, with innovative house designs, albeit on small blocks, and excellent lifestyle facilities shared under a community title. Obviously it costs more to buy into one of these sanctuaries.

Andersons continues: "The problem, particularly in Sydney, is that much of the housing has been built before the infrastructure of amenities, services, new public schools and particularly public transport supply, so everyone drives themselves and their children everywhere, and inadequate roads are often choked. Even the limited amount of trees and greenery hasn't had a chance to grow yet and soften the impact of all those bricks and tiles."

The iconic quarter-acre suburban block (1000 square metres), apparently deemed a thing of the past, now exists in Sydney only in the well-established middle-suburban ring. Because of the shortage of available land around the city, when outer land is released and rezoned from rural to urban, Planning NSW requires developers to create 15 home sites per hectare, including roads, parks and amenities.

These new urban fringe blocks are half, or even less, the size of the traditional block - only 500, 400, even 300 square metres. New blocks in Melbourne, which has more land, are larger, about 600 square metres. So we have this inverse doughnut effect of dense inner city, spacious middle suburbia, and increasingly dense outer suburbia.

"Higher density saves on the cost of infrastructure like roads, power, water, and tightens sprawl," says Andersons. "But the negating effect from this not-properly-assessed good intention is that these oversized houses consume huge amounts of energy and create huge greenhouse emissions. Also, there's the anomalous situation of creating suburbia without the benefits of suburbia.

"Big houses on small blocks, with narrow footpaths and narrow roads, allow little space to plant trees, as branches will hit houses, roots get into drains, and leaves drop on manicured lawns. Houses are so close that you must keep windows shut, have tinted glass, or blinds and curtains drawn, and the air-conditioning on, to get visual and acoustic privacy."

The traditional backyard has gone, along with its trees, garden, vegie patch, often pool, washing line and shed, where children could let their bodies and imaginations run free and build tree houses, cubbyhouses, billycarts, dig in the dirt and invent games. Now it's indoor computer games, and, given there's no room for a decent run-up in most McMansion courtyards, children are driven to sport and formally organised activities most days of the week.

Several major changes have occurred in the house and land equation in the past 15 years.

A house used to cost twice as much as the land. Now that land prices have skyrocketed, land costs twice the price of the house.

Average house sizes have increased 60 per cent since 1990, from 169 square metres to 270 square metres. But in Baulkham Hills Shire in Sydney's north-west, the average new home size last year was 418.5 square metres. McMansion owners now live in a two-storey house more than twice the size of the modest single-storey house most grew up in with their parents. Yet average household sizes are shrinking - from 3.7 people in 1981 to 2.7 in 2001.

Moving into McMansion Land is not as cheap as it used to be, especially in NSW. Established Kellyville houses sell at auction for $750,000 to $800,000, and in Castle Hill, more than $1 million is common.

A 450 square metre block of land sells in Kellyville for $390,000. Last month in Castle Hill, 20 unusually large blocks, from 700 to 928 square metres, with some mature trees, sold on the first day of release for $530,000 to $635,000.

An "absolute glamour" mega McMansion in Castle Hill, with five bedrooms, private theatre, gymnasium, four garages, large pool, floodlit tennis court and Zen-inspired gardens, on half a hectare, also sold last month - for $2.1 million.

The prices for building these huge off-the-peg houses, however, seem surprisingly low.

"The project home industry is so competitive that mass-produced houses are really dirt cheap per square metre," says Andersons. "You pay $2000 a square metre for an individual architect-designed house or, because of different construction costs, for an inner-city high-rise apartment. Project homes cost $500 to $550 per square metre. So you get a huge amount of house for your money, more bang for your buck.

"People who care about architecture and design aren't going to live here. But others will rationalise: why would I want to live in an artful city shoebox when for the same price I can buy something four times as big and fantastic? No amount of ideological debate will change this while the price differential is so gigantic."

Graham Jahn, past president of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, concurs: "The Americanisation of global house design has become so ingrained that builders will tell you the house market demands 'the biggest house on the smallest site at the lowest price'. These buildings owe nothing to lifestyle but everything to image. Image has become more important than quality."

To understand the McMansions mentality, the best place to start is the newly opened HomeWorld 4, which claims it is the world's largest display home village.

HomeWorlds 1, 2, 3 and now 4 are in Kellyville, in Sydney's north-west growth area. Once a sleepy-hollow semi-rural belt with orchards, cow paddocks, scattered older houses and established gardens, it was rezoned in the mid-to-late 1990s and its population has been growing at 14,000 a year. Everyone builds McMansions.

It's both aspirational voter heartland and Bible belt. At Hillsong Church's 3500-seat auditorium at Baulkham Hills, a phenomenal 12,000 people attend the charismatic "prosperity preaching" services each weekend. Across the boulevard is the showplace Norwest Business Park, now the size of a suburb. Newly opened church-run private schools, vast new shopping centres and sports complexes are booming.

The 'money-go-round' of the local economy creates its own network of local jobs."

Professor Bill Randolph, head of the Urban Frontiers Program at the University of Western Sydney, says: "The old idea that the western urban fringe is filled with battlers from diverse, less affluent groups and struggling first-home buyers is now totally wrong. It's been replaced by an undiverse monoculture of middle-to-higher-income families. These new residents are not the 'white flight' leaving the inner city, but rather are the wave of upgrading aspirational locals, leapfrogging sideways from old fibro cottages and modest home areas into the new frontier of mega-mansions."

Most are second- or third-home buyers, many are couples with nought to three young children. There are some empty-nesters and retirees, some single parents, but almost no singles. A high proportion are managers, administrators and professionals; one-fifth of households earn more than $2000 a week. One-fifth of households own three or more cars; the area has the highest car usage in Australia and the third-highest computer and internet usage.

Mark Latham, Labor shadow treasurer and federal member for Werriwa in Sydney's south-west, has been beating the drum on his point that the new affluence in the west has redrawn the political map, and that the west no longer automatically votes Labor.

"When I grew up in Green Valley in the 1970s, our values were based on the politics of us versus them - the working class versus the old money," he recently wrote. "Now when a person grows up in my electorate, they can see prosperity in the neighbourhood next door. Social mobility has become more tangible and achievable. The politics of envy has been replaced by the politics of aspiration."

And so to HomeWorld 4, with its 120 display dream homes, by 20 different builders, priced from $80,000 to $600,000.

In five years' time it will be sold off, and HomeWorld 5 built.

More than 10,000 people visit the village every week, and given that more than 80 per cent of new homes built in Sydney are project homes, the designs that sell at HomeWorld will shape the future look of the city.

Frank Death, chief executive of HomeWorld, explains: "What usually happens is that a couple will visit up to 15 times before they decide which home they love best, and it's mostly the woman who decides. Buyers are better informed and more sophisticated today, they ask a lot more questions. Then they go and buy a block to build it on. Due to the shortage of land, only 10 to 20 per cent of new homes are built on greenfield [undeveloped] sites; up to 90 per cent of business is knock-down and rebuild.

"People are recognising that the cost of renovating is so high. Why pay $120,000 to get two new bedrooms, a new bathroom and kitchen, and still have an old house with old plaster, old plumbing and wiring, when for the same price you can get a beautiful four-bedroom brand-new house?"

Understated, streamlined, minimalist are not the go at HomeWorld; overstated it is.

Most of the popular builders offer six or more facades that can be fitted to the same interior. You can whack on faux French Provincial, Tuscan, Georgian, Federation, Victoriana, Colonial, American Colonial, Australian traditional or modern.

"In HomeWorld 3, the Heritage and Federation theme was most favoured. Here, it's more Tuscan, Georgian, less face brick, and more adventurous painted finishes on bagged brick and cement render," says Death.

"In previous days the double and triple garage was the dominant feature, but builders have responded to the criticism and now garages are recessed or relieved and the external entry is the dominant feature, with porticos, columns, even verandas above (like Juliet balconies). We're also encouraging people to become more aware of their block orientation when selecting a house, and builders will mirror-reverse and adapt house plans to achieve the best solar orientation."

Once you're inside the double-height entry, many of the new display homes feel the same - that is, hardly any walls or doors, just flowing open space all the way through to the rear glass doors and courtyard patio. Cosiness is out. A lot of it feels like dead space that would never be used and would be difficult to furnish, though interior designers have done a lot with feature ornaments on pedestals. You won't need too many pictures, as there are no walls to hang them on.

A void above the front entry and the grand staircase lift your gaze to the upper level. Downstairs, formal dining and living rooms have given way to more informal living spaces. The big open-plan kitchen/family room/rumpus room is the command post of the house.

Practical concerns, such as whether the house is going to cost a fortune to heat as there's nowhere to close off, and how to control noise flow from one section of the building to another, appear not to rate. All houses come with a list of optional extra upgrades, such as state-of-the-art stainless-steel kitchen fixtures, granite benches, gold powerpoints and bathroom taps, more insulation, higher-grade tiles and/or bricks.

"There's a house in here to suit every taste," promises Death, and finally I spot one, a streamlined house with lots of verandas and no ungainly kitsch, one that puts quality ahead of quantity. But, ouch, it costs $540,000 on your land.

In the Beechwood Homes display, design consultant Howard Dewhurst says cheerily: "You'd be amazed how many people come in, say they've spent the last year working and arguing with their architect, and have already put in a new kitchen and bathroom, but are prepared to write off the lot, knock down and rebuild, as they'll still be ahead.

"And forget about empty nesters downsizing - it's a myth. Every day we see parents whose kids have all left, who want to knock down their old small house and build a big new model, all fresh and clean and low-maintenance."

But not everyone speaks in glowing terms about the value of McMansions, which are often scorned as "slums of the future".

Professor Jim McKnight, 49, head of the school of psychology at the University of Western Sydney, who's also been a licensed builder since his 20s, says, "I think some of them are complete rubbish. Look, project home builders are geniuses at what they do. They get a big, smart-looking house to stand up, by using the minimum possible materials.

"There's no way a quality private builder can compete with these guys.

They're geniuses at managing the cost of materials and labour. Everything is pre-cut, and a builder and his gang will go in and lay a slab in two days, and frame up the house in the next two days.

"This absurd fad of roofs with no eaves cost-cuts on many metres of roof tiles and batons. Most now use plastic pipes glued together instead of copper pipes, and polystyrene frames for the slabs.

"They're totally legal, but I still reckon some of these houses are flimsy and will age very quickly. I give them a 25-year use-by date; then the owners will want to knock them down and build a new one. We've seen built-in obsolescence in everything else, so why not in project houses?"

Driving through McMansion Land with McKnight, he brakes to point out cracking walls, shoddy crooked brickwork, short cuts in materials, design and finish.

Walking into a display home, he remarks: "Windows are cheaper than bricks, so some of these homes are almost all windows.

People forget they'll need to spend a fortune on blinds and curtains." He disapproves of the rattly hollow-core doors, easily finds less-than-perfect carpentry, plasterwork, plumbing, and grunts: "And these are their display homes - you think they'd try better."

A tall man, McKnight indicates visual tricks that interior designers use to make the low ceilings look higher, and big interiors look bigger. He sits on a dining room chair and says, "See, they cut the legs off the chairs and the table. And note all the tall, skinny vertical vases and candles, to lead the eye upwards." Upstairs he lies on the low beds, his feet hanging over the end. "They even use short beds."

McKnight dislikes the overcrowding of mega-mansions, and feels that instead of encouraging neighbourliness, it does the reverse. "Put four guys in a prison cell together and you often find they never talk to each other. It's the only way to maintain some private space."

But he praises the more thoughtful master-planned communities, like Harrington Park, which has tree-laden streets and parks, and excellent neighbourhood and lifestyle facilities.

Newbury, a 157-hectare new estate between Kellyville and Parklea, master-planned by Landcom and developed by Mirvac, is also receiving praise. (Landcom is a NSW state-owned corporation which drives government policy on urban development and urban consolidation, and enters into joint ventures with developers.)

Stuart McCowan, Landcom's development director, urban development, explains: "Newbury will have 1800 residential homes, divided into eight neighbourhoods. Each of these has its own private clubhouse, swimming pool and tennis court, held under a community title, and residents pay a levy of $600 a year for upkeep. The infrastructure will all be provided upfront, along with parks, walking tracks, bike tracks and tree planting on footpaths.

"To get a successful community, you need communication happening, and Newbury has been designed to make it easy for people to meet each other in an attractive and safe environment."

Or that's the theory, anyway. Like Harrington Park, Newbury has a community welcome program, with an officer who helps neighbours meet, arranges functions, and helps to get a community association flourishing.

Well aware of criticism of McMansions, Newbury is trying to find better design solutions for fitting a sizeable house and garage on a small block in an aesthetically pleasing manner, and which also take into account solar access, overshadowing, privacy and noise.

Says sociologist Gabrielle Gwyther: "Master-planned communities market a set of values within a bounded site, a different sort of aesthetic to a normal land development, which is just blocks and streets. People will happily pay more to buy into one, as it's a greater safeguard of their social and economic status.

"Residents at Harrington Park love the place, they're rapt in the neighbourly stuff, like everyone going for a walk at dusk, taking the bottle of chardonnay down to sit at the edge of the lake. Every day there is like a celebration of the fact that they've worked their way up from their working-class roots, and made it. They say they never have to go out. Between their big houses and what the estate provides, it's all they need." But others who live not in estates but in the normal Kellyville-type streets of McMansions shoe-horned onto small blocks seem to love it, too.

Joe Pereira, 33, who wrote the soyaccino letter, is a community relations manager with the Roads and Traffic Authority; his wife, Kris, 28, is a teacher, on maternity leave after the birth of their third child. They leapfrogged sideways from their older, modest first home in 2000.

In the airy open-plan family room of their four-bedroom home on a 450 square metre block, kids tumbling on the floor, Joe explains: "We saw it as a great chance to build a brand-new home to raise our family. We knew the area was going to boom, and we felt we were moving into a place that shared similar values and aspirations, even spiritual beliefs, to ours. Yes, it's the Bible belt; we go to the Catholic church.

"We met all our neighbours when we were all building our new homes at the same time, and we all really like each other. Most have kids, and we're always helping each other out."

Kris adds: "It would be lovely to have more greenery around, but we're planting trees, and it will come in time. We're in the beginning stages of a very exciting suburb."

Joe admits: "Yes, you can bag the architecture, the houses do have a conformity, but it doesn't bother us in the slightest as we have so much room inside. If we are supposed to be so miserable living in these awful McMansions, then I wonder what it's like to be happy.

"We sometimes joke that the only thing missing from our house is the white picket fence. We have the nuclear family - mum at home with three kids, dad going to work, the station wagon in the garage. We love it all, and why not? We're here to stay."

A few blocks away lives Anne Kirman, in her mid-40s, a dietician now studying for a bachelor of education degree at Macquarie University. Her husband, David, works in IT. The couple moved sideways into Kellyville six years ago, buying an existing four-bedroom display home on an unusually large 800 square metre battleaxe block for $340,000.

As her two daughters whiz around on in-line skates, she explains: "We're so glad we did, because you can't even buy the land alone for that now. Coming here allowed us to buy a big, comfortable house without going into hock for a $500,000 mortgage. I've got my own study full of books, the kids have heaps of space for their junk, we've planted lots of trees and a vegie patch in the backyard.

"Our house isn't perfect by any means. We face west, and the upper storey was a hotbox until we installed awnings and extra insulation.

"There are lots of homes around here I don't like, but I've seen just as many bad ones in Glebe and Paddington. Sure, we'd love to live in an architect-designed house - if we could get it for the same price as a project house. But what the heck, we'd rather live in

a McMansion than a terrace house. There's a great focus on family and education in this district, and heaps of activities for kids, and to us, that's what it's all about. My sister lives in Cherrybrook, one of the first McMansion suburbs, and I remember when it was first built, it looked ghastly, all scorched brown earth and bare. Now Cherrybrook's filled with trees and it looks no different to Wahroonga."

I admit to Kirman that after visiting McMansion Land umpteen times over the previous weeks, I'm becoming brainwashed to regard ostentatious, faux-look, over-decorated houses as normal - ditto the no-tree look. In fact, when you suddenly spot a more restrained, streamlined house, or one like hers, with trees, it looks almost out of place.

"Yes," she laughs, "I do know what you mean. But I'd like to educate the developers to leave every tree standing, and design some better-looking McMansions."

After almost four years studying master-planned communities in McMansion Land, Gabrielle Gwyther has become very fond of the people, but reflects on those little pieces of paradise: "I still feel they're selling the sizzle, rather than the steak. But these people are so happy with it - and who has the answers in life, anyway?"